Teaching

Course descriptions for Fall 2018 can be found below.

Digital Game Cultures

Over the past 40 years, video games have transformed from household novelties and hobbyist toys to one of the most globally recognized forms of popular entertainment. Games are no longer marginal entertainment: they are definitive modes of experience in the 21st century worthy of scholarly and critical engagement. To this end this class offers a broad introduction to the phenomenon of video games, from play and design to finance and preservation. Our goal is to transform the simple everyday pleasures of games into something new, complex, and unfamiliar.

Politics of Code (PhD)

This course begins with the twin propositions that all technology is inherently political, and that digital technologies have come to define our contemporary media landscape. Software, hardware, and code shape the practices and discourses of our digital culture, such that in order to understand the present we must take seriously the politics of the digital. The course will primarily focus on the politics and theory of the past twenty years, from the utopian discourses of the early web to the rise of immaterial labor economies and the quantification and management of subjects and populations. Our ultimate goal will be to identify a political theory of the present age - one that takes seriously the role of computation and digitization.